This This GQ interview with Mark Penn is full of weird, fascinating, and delusional stuff. I'm still digging through it, but one thing that struck me in particular was Penn's claim that he wanted to go on the offense against Obama on the war -- making the argument that Obama's votes didn't fit his I've-been-against-the-war-from-the-start message. I don't really think that would have worked, but it's particularly interesting when combined with this factoid that I hadn't heard before:
Why do you think the rest of the team was afraid to go after him?
I think they thought that her position on Iraq wasn't strong enough to sustain a debate on Iraq.
Or popular enough.
Right. But her position, remember -- we went through the early discussion of “Was it a mistake? Should she apologize?” Of course, the rest of the team wanted her to apologize. [laughs] And you know, she weathered that extremely well. She didn't apologize, because she had given a speech outlining her position. On that day. And that speech held up. It actually explained why she voted for Iraq and why it was a sincere vote at the time.
So Penn wanted to go on the offensive and other staffers wanted to apologize, and so instead she refused to apologize, but also refused to actually criticize Obama. That's pretty much the worst of all possible worlds I think and another example of why Clinton's let-the-staffers-fight-it-out management strategy wasn't very effective.
(Side note: When I first read about this I thought it was a CQ interview not a GQ interview, which made me wonder what a merged GQ/CQ (call it QQ, which, really, would be an awesome magazine name) would be like. Any thoughts?)
--Sam Boyd
